Tobias Lear - Missing Washington Papers

Missing Washington Papers

Lear's only biographer, Ray Brighton, was convinced that Lear destroyed many of Washington's letters and diary entries, which he had possession of for about a year after Washington's death. Lear was to work on a Washington biography with Bushrod Washington, a Washington nephew, who had contacted Lear about collecting Washington's papers and collaborating on a Washington biography. Swaths of Washington's diary (especially sections during the presidency and the American Revolutionary War) and a few key letters were discovered missing about a year after their transfer to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, who had instead volunteered to write the biography. Lear denied destroying any papers in a long letter to Marshall; however, Lear's own correspondence casts this into doubt. Lear wrote Alexander Hamilton offering to suppress Washington documents: "There are as you well know among the several letters and papers many which every public and private consideration should withhold from further inspection." Lear explicitly asked Hamilton in that letter if he desired any military papers removed. Suspiciously, almost all the presidential diary entries are gone except for those that covered Washington's 1789 visit to Lear's family home in Portsmouth. Six key Washington letters are also missing.